“I’ll be damned,” Winterman said.
“Now they tell me!” Trimble took off with lunging strides, his good eye glittering balefully.
One of the police laboratory men said, “It’s an ice pick, all right, Harry — the ordinary varnished pine-handle type. The only fingerprints on it are King’s.”
“What did I tell you?” George Hathaway cried from the hall. The body was still on the floor, lying like a dummy in a chalked outline, and the station manager had taken one look, swallowed, and stepped back. “He killed himself! What better evidence could you want, Sergeant?”
“You give up easy, Mr. Hathaway,” Trimble growled. “I can think of lots better evidence. A dying man will do funny things. King’s prints could have got on the handle if he’d tried to pull the ice pick out of his chest — after somebody else put it there.” Hathaway muttered something, and Trimble turned back to the lab man. “How does it stack up for suicide, Lew?”
The technician shrugged. “The angle of thrust is okay for a self-inflicted wound — if it was self-inflicted.”
“Any hesitation marks?”
“No, but you know, Harry, that doesn’t rule suicide out. I’ve seen plenty of suicides determined enough to plunge the blade in nice and clean on the first try. And ice picks go in like into cream cheese.”
Trimble grunted. “I just found out this isn’t King’s regular dressing room, Lew. His is number 2, right across the hall. Better go over that, too.”
“By the way,” Sergeant Winterman asked Hathaway, “just whose dressing room is this?”
“Nobody’s in particular, Sergeant. It’s given to guest stars, usually — they all like that number 1. Today it’s been unoccupied.”
Layton and Hathaway tagged after the two detectives as the Homicide men headed for Hubert Stander’s office.
“Seems to me this is awfully sloppy police work,” the station manager mumbled. “Where’s the police doctor?”
“In the movies,” Layton said. “The body will be examined by a doctor from the coroner’s office at the Hall of Justice.”
“The Hall of Justice?”
“In the basement there. That’s where the morgue is.” They reached the board chairman’s office just in time to hear Sergeant Trimble say to his partner, “Get that Arkwright woman in here, Ed.”
Winterman held his wrist up to his eyes in the gloomy board room; the Venetian blinds were still closed. “The show has eighteen minutes to go yet, Harry.” He grinned. “Want I should bust in?”
“We’re still on the air!” Hathaway yelped. “You can’t do that!”
Trimble glowered, evidently tempted. But then he said, “All right, we’ll wait.”
Nancy King was on the big couch, her hands folded in her lap, staring up at nothing. Hubert Stander was at the window Hathaway had opened earlier, staring down at nothing.
They all waited.
5
But after a few minutes Sergeant Trimble became restless.
“About that ice pick,” he said. “You don’t see many ice picks around these days.”
“Well, I never saw it before,” Hathaway said defensively, “If that’s what you’re getting at. Any ice needed in the dressing rooms, or anywhere else in the building, comes in cubes out of refrigerators.”
“You ever see an ice pick in this building, Mr. Stander?”
Stander turned from the window. “What Sergeant?”
Trimble repeated his question. Stander did not even bother to reply. He shrugged and turned back to the window.
“How about you, Mrs. King?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Could your husband have brought one here from home?”
“We’ve never had an ice pick. Unless...”
Trimble glanced at Winterman, and Winterman said, “Unless what?”
“Unless he brought it from his apartment in Hollywood.” She seemed to feel a need to explain. “You see, that was necessary — I mean, Tutter’s maintaining a separate apartment. Our house is out in the Valley, but he had to have a place where he could pretend to be a bachelor.”
“Did he have an ice pick in the Hollywood apartment, Mrs. King?” the one-eyed detective asked.
“I can’t say. I’ve never been in it.”
The lovely, expensive voice told nothing, nothing at all. She’s had plenty of practice covering up, Layton thought. What a heel King must have been to make her lead a life like that. Layton had a sudden vision of Lola Arkwright leaning across the table in King’s dressing room and cupping his boyish face. I’ll bet the redhead knows her way around King’s Hollywood apartment, he thought grimly.
“What, Sergeant?” Layton said.
Trimble was eyeing him curiously. “I asked you if you’d seen an ice pick in King’s dressing room — number 2 — when you had that talk with him before the show you told me about.”
“I didn’t notice one.”
Winterman said, “Wait a minute, Harry. There must be a prop room here. Prop rooms store all kinds of junk.”
“Is there an ice pick in your prop room, Mr. Hathaway?” Trimble asked.
“How the devil would I know?” Hathaway said irritably.
“Ed, find out.”
Winterman went out, shutting the door. Nobody said anything. When Winterman returned, he said, “Yeah, they’ve got an ice pick, but it’s still there, the guy says.”
“Better have one of the men check.”
The swarthy detective made a face and went out again. When he came back the second time he said, “Say, the Arkwright babe ought to know, Harry. I mean about if Tutter kept an ice pick handy. She seems to’ve been on what Layton here would call ‘intimate terms’ with Tutter-boy.”
Layton, watching Nancy King, could have walked over and gladly punched Winterman’s ugly nose. It was all part of the game, he knew, this deliberate baiting of the principals at the start of a suspected-homicide investigation; but there was something about this woman that touched Layton in a spot he had never known existed. Her only visible reaction to Winterman’s foul blow was a slight quivering of her hands, immediately controlled. She was denied by King’s cruelty even the ordinary female luxury of showing jealousy.
Trimble changed the subject. “We may as well get a clear picture of the situation during the newscast, as long as we have to mark time here. Let’s see, we know your movements, Mr. Hathaway... Oh, Mrs. King. Where were you when your husband’s show stopped for the news break?”
“In the studio, Sergeant.”
“Studio A.”
“Yes. When Tutter left at the break, I decided to go back to his dressing room to see him — he hadn’t noticed me sitting there.”
“How soon after he left the studio did you leave?”
“Oh... a quarter of a minute or so.”
“Was he in his dressing room?”
“I don’t know. I mean, I knew of course that his room number was 2, although this is the first time I’ve actually been in the station. His door was shut.” She colored the palest pink. “I... decided not to go in, after all. Even though it was his last telecast, he might have been upset to see me here, and he still had the balance of his show to do. Anyway, I returned to the studio.”
“Anything special you wanted to see Tutter about?”
She shook her head. “Just to let him know I was here. As I say, I decided not to bother him till after the show. I didn’t think Tutter would be upset when it was all over. After all, it was his last show.” She stopped, apparently surprised by what she had said. “His last show,” she repeated slowly. “That’s very funny.”
No one laughed. As for Layton, he was engaged in looking into himself. This was something he had been shoving to the bottom of his mind ever since it had happened. What’s the matter with me? he thought. Don’t tell me Foot-loose and Fancy-free Layton is falling for a pair of big eyes!